I’m Howard. Like most people, I do a lot of different things. I do some of them for money. This site is where you’ll be able to find all of them, and it’s the only home for some of them.

I’m probably best known for Schlock Mercenary, the online comic space opera that I created back in 2000, and which updates every day at schlockmercenary.com. It’s what currently feeds our family, and that’s awesome.

You might have heard my voice on Writing Excuses, the weekly podcast for genre fiction writers that I co-host with Mary Robinette Kowal, Brandon Sanderson, and Dan Wells. We launched that back in 2008, and it updates weekly at writingexcuses.com.

I also review movies, and I’m horribly biased. If you want to know whether I had fun at the cinema, you can follow my reviews at this site clicking on the “Movie Review” tag. Or that link.

Looking for my prose? MyBibliography has the full list, or at least it will eventually. Most recently, my short story “An Honest Death” appears in SHADOWS BENEATH: The Writing Excuses Anthology. I’ve also done novelettes, novellas, shorts, and even flash pieces for Skull Island Expeditions (a Privateer Press imprint). If you like Lovecraftian horror, my work has also appeared in Space Eldritch, and Space Eldritch II: The Haunted Stars.

On the side, for no pay whatsoever, I paint 28mm miniatures, experiment with food, and crash in front of the occasional video game (my latest grinds have been XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, but I’ve got a dog’s age worth of hours in Skyrim, too.)

I also write a lot. Usually it’s tweets, but sometimes I blog about stuff that is important. Or at least important to me. Or maybe just distracting, and I’m blogging my thoughts in order to get them off of my plate so I can get some work done. This site is going to be a veritable treasure trove of that stuff. Some of it will probably embarrass me.

On the completely non-embarrassing front, I’m the very happy husband to Sandra Tayler, and we’re the parents of four. I am a Mormon, a cat-owner, and a home-owner (though it can be argued that the cat owns the house, paperwork notwithstanding.)

But who am I really? Beyond the things I make, and the people I love (and the cat who demands my fealty), beyond the physical features and the conglomeration of organic molecules I’ve bound up in my 46-year quest to forestall entropy, who am I?

Photo by Vladimir Chopine

Seriously? How can I answer that? Look, the best I can do is say that I have been all of the Howards who wrote these journal entries, and each of them was a stage along the long, transformative path to the me of the now. And I’m just the latest stage. Anyway, if you want to read the blog and meet all those other guys, be my guest.

Be warned, though: they’re not me. And neither is the guy who wrote this…

Kingsman: The Secret Service falls short of “summer blockbuster” status by virtue of more than just its February release. Its R-rating is earned, at least in part, through some spectacularly violent moments whose absence, were they to be edited out for broader audience appeal, would leave the movie bland. For genre fans like me it’s way […]

It’s got some Wachowski-sized holes in its world-building, and it feels too long to sit through, but Jupiter Ascending has some of the very best sci-fi action scenes I’ve ever had the pleasure to watch. The running, the flying, the shooting, the fighting… all of it hung together in ways that made sense, and the directors […]

Seventh Son was reasonably entertaining, the effects were good, and Jeff Bridges was funny, but ultimately it fell kind of flat for me. I grew increasingly annoyed with Bridges “accent,” which sounded exactly like his mouthful of marbles thing from R.I.P.D. The affectation seemed to fit his character, but none of the accents in the film were […]

Myke Cole burst into my reading queue when I met him at Lunacon in 2012. I devoured his debut novel, then waited patiently for the follow-ups, which I consumed with aplomb. Gemini Cell is Myke’s fourth foray into the 21st century’s “Great Reawakening,” a setting in which magic has come back into our world, and […]

We watched Back to the Future, and then Back to the Future, Part II with our kids last night. The 2015 imagined by Robert Zemeckis was a satire (of course,) and lots of people have discussed where it hit and where it missed. It was particularly interesting to watch my kids react to the film. […]

If you didn’t enjoy the first two installments in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit franchise, you probably won’t like this one, either, because it doubles down on everything. If you did enjoy them, this one pretty much sticks the landing. There were bits I didn’t like much (the Sauron/Necromancer “Jefferson Airplane” visual tops that list) but this […]

I love the penguins in the Madagascar films, but they’re best taken in small doses with no character arcs. This film was fun, but it wasn’t awesome. If you’ve seen the third Madagascar film, the one with the circus, the opening chase scene is over-the-top hilarious. Delightful. Penguins of Madagascar gives us a gondola chase […]

Exodus: Gods and Kings is pretty powerful, but it might rub a lot of folks the wrong way. It doesn’t tell the story of Moses the way biblical literalists would have it be told. (Disclaimer: It’s also not the story of Moses that I believe in, but I didn’t expect it to be.) That’s okay. […]

I am quite happy to have looked up the length of this film prior to scheduling a trip to the cinema. Per Twitter: Looked up INTERSTELLAR. Good grief, it’s 2 hours and 49 minutes long. That’s “fly a spaceship into Mordor” length. — Howard Tayler (@howardtayler) November 10, 2014 This one didn’t clear the Threshold […]

Big Hero 6 ended up being less than what I had hoped for thanks to the trailers. In order to explain why, I need to risk spoiling some things, which I do with great reluctance. Before I start, if you haven’t seen the trailers for Big Hero 6, stop reading this and go see the […]

This month’s syllabus topic is story structure, and we’ll be starting with the part we start with. And that part usually isn’t the beginning — that’s where the story starts for the reader. We’re going to talk about where the story starts for you. It’s the answer to questions like “where is my story coming […]

It’s time for a Q&A on characters! The questions for this episode were provided by the attendees at the 2014 Out of Excuses Workshop and Retreat: How do you have a character grow in power and/or expertise without needing to ridiculously overpower the villains? How do you give a flawed character a growth arc without […]

Brush pen and white gel pen. Colors added digitally by Travis Walton. Usually I go for a slightly less stylized look when drawing planets in the Schlock Mercenary setting, but this panel seemed to need a bit more whimsy.